"Follow me in merry measure"

I would herein like to express my concern over lack of holiday spirit and "magic" expressed by a goodly number of my friends and colleagues. It seems to me that this is a normal part of what many of us seem to be going through this year. A sudden realization that this holiday is not made for us. Tis a holiday for children and parents not for apathetic or angsty college students. Mayhaps we can attend a jolly drunk holiday party and sing carols at the top of our lungs and make out with several attractive colleagues under the mistletoe and wake up in the morning with a headache and a slight feeling of over compensation for the undeniable lack of any "magic" present in any of it.

It worries me that our apathy has demolished something that for many of us was something we could not help but care about and get utterly excited over as children. But, in chosing to not care about some things many other things that we used to care about, and might even still try to care about, disintegrate into a mild feeling within us that some feeling ought to be there. If you don't have the holiday spirit in the back of your heart throughout the year, my friends, it will not come back because you participate in a few over commercialized activities. Rituals rarely bring the feeling they are intended to bring but rather bring out a feeling that is already present and is being celebrated within the ritual. If you don't care that people are poor you probably wont care on Christmas. If you don't see things you wish you could buy and give people every time you go to the store, you probably won't be excited to buy them something around Christmas. We forget that the difference between many of us now and many of us then is that then we were constantly excited about things. Christmas was just a time where there were particularly beautiful decorations and a particularly good reason to celebrate and we actually got to give and get. Many of us daily though would wait with nearly as much anticipation for our parents to tell us we could go play with a friend as we waited on Christmas Eve for Santa Claus. Many of us daily saw something new and were excited about it just as on Christmas Eve we may have become excited that Jesus was coming into the world. It isn't that the spirit or "magic" have disappeared from Christmas, for many of us it is that they have disappeared altogether. The closest thing many of us have is when we experience a similar dumbed down version of it when we start a new relationship or partake in some particularly sensuous activities or even merely catch someone's eye for the first time or receive our paycheck every month.

In short what I am proposing is that if you chose not to care about some things then you may care less about all things. I would like to see more of my friends feeling excited to throw snow or bake cookies than throwing snow and baking cookies to feel excited. Excitement has become for many of us a thing you experience when something good happens not a thing you experience in anticipation of something good just maybe happening... we have all been disappointed too many times. So forget about holiday spirit... all of you... forget about "magic" and even tradition... just do the stuff like you would any other day. Just enjoy it. And don't even bother trying to get excited about it. You just might find yourself excited anyways... if college hasn't eaten your soul yet.

(Sorry to those of you who find this post annoying, beside the point, etc. I was mostly just lecturing to myself and using you as my audience.)